264 Evolution and Social Reform: 



An order of society which is unobjectionable and even ad- 

 mirable for a world hastening to destruction, must look 

 quite different seen from the standpoint of a world which 

 has the promise of indefinite duration. It is a vice of 

 criticism old and new that no sufficient allowance is made 

 for the bias of the expectation, cherished equally by Jesus 

 and his disciples, of a catastrophic ending of the mundane 

 order of their time, and the establishment in its place of 

 the kingdom of heaven upon earth. What Jesus and Paul 

 might have thought of industry and property and marriage 

 and government and slavery, and such things generally, if 

 they had imagined such continuance of the old order as 

 was actually unrolled, we do not know. But, knowing that 

 their every social opinion was subject to the bias of their 

 hope, Ave must neither hold them absolutely responsible for 

 their opinions, nor go to them as if it were likely we should 

 find in them a social rule agreeable to the continuous and 

 stable order of the world. 



The New Testament had not reached its final term, 

 before, in Second Peter, written about 170 of our era, we 

 hear a wail of disappointment and regret : " Where is the 

 promise of his coming ? For since the fathers fell asleep 

 all things remain as they were from the beginning of the 

 world." Long before that there was doubtless many a 

 doubter, and many an Ananias who kept back part, and 

 then the Avhole, of his estate from the common stock and 

 store. It does not even appear that the Christian Commune 

 ever got any hold outside Jerusalem. Paul was obliged to 

 take the Corinthian Christians in hand for not sharing even 

 the bread and wine of the communion-feast, some eating 

 and drinking what they took with them and others getting 

 nothing. Nevertheless, it was not a little that passed over 

 from the Christianity of Jesus and his first disciples into 

 the early and the later Christian church. The words of 

 Paul and Jesus about marriage died, as rules of general 

 api)licatioii, to rise again as "counsels of perfection," cel- 

 ibacy for those who could endure the strain ; and hence, 

 with many things co-operant to the end, the immense de- 

 velopment of anchoritic and monastic life. And it was the 

 monastic orders that perpetuated the ideal, if not the 

 practice, of poverty in the Christian church. Even before 

 the conversion of the lloman empire the church, as an 

 ecclesiastical institution, began to grow rich, and it grew 



